On Description

From PJ Parrish at Kill Zone Blog: How Much Description Does Your Book Need?

And of course you know I personally love description. So does PJ Parrish, it turns out, and the centerpiece of this post is a wonderful set of examples of descriptions of characters. Which is actually not the kind of description on which I personally focus; I was thinking of scenes and landscape more than characters. But these are wonderful examples.

I think my favorite is:

[His] jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down–from high flat temples–in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

However, the one I actually recognized right off was the final example.

Parrish then goes on:

I come down on the pro side of description. As I said, it is one of the potent tools in your craft box. When done well, it creates atmosphere and mood, sets a scene, and gives your reader a context to the world you are asking them to enter. It also helps your readers emotionally bond with your characters, having them see, feel, hear and smell the story.

However, the basic take-home advice here is: Describe, but only when it makes a difference. … Like any skill, it’s something you have to practice, play with, and fine tune. It also is part of your style. Your way of describing things should be singular to you. … Be aware, when you the writer enter a scene, that you do it with sensory logic. Always consider the sequence of the senses. Smell is often the first thing you notice. Sound might be the primary thing triggered. Sight is rarely the first sense to connect.

Followed by a good example of a descriptive passage.

Good post! Meaning I agree with basically everything Parrish says here.

For paragraph-by-paragraph sensual description, I nominate Aud trilogy by Nicola Griffith: The Blue Place, Stay, and Always.

An April night in Atlanta between thunderstorms: dark and warm and wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azaliea blossoms. Nearly midnight. I had been walking for over an hour, covering four or five miles. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t sleepy.

Or later

Imagine a blood orange, torn open, and a highly polished mahogany desk. Smear one over the other and add a wash of light blue: dawn over Ireland; rich, unearthly colours that reached past my eyes and stole part of my soul. People were not designed to see such things. I felt the cellular hum of four hundred people as they dreamed or worried or rehearsed speeches in their head in this steel and aluminium shell thirty-three thousand feet over the sea, hurtling through air that is just that, thin air, and knew we were remote from the world, separate, aloof, supported by nothing but speed and physical laws I could recite but have never really believed.

These books are not available in ebook form. I think Nicola has the rights back. I wish she would delegate if she doesn’t have time. If she asked for a volunteer to take a file and format it for KDP, I bet she’d get any number of hands going up.

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